The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established in 1949 to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the fine arts.

Additional lecture program recordings in this series will be made available as podcasts in the coming months.

About: Andrew W. Mellon

Art and Representation in the Ancient New World
Mary Miller, Yale University
This five-part lecture series offers an overview of pre-Columbian art history, with detailed discussion of time, beauty, and truth in the visual cultures of ancient and colonial Mesoamerica.

Part 1: The Shifting Now of the Pre-Columbian Past
In this audio podcast of the first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 18, 2010, art historian and archaeologist Mary Miller presents a history of the reception of pre-Columbian art from its arrival in Europe in the 16th century to the present day, as new discoveries continually transform the field.

Picasso and Truth
T. J. Clark, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and professor of history of art, University of California, Berkeley
Centered on a group of paintings by Picasso from the 1920s, a series of six lectures traces the artist's path to Guernica.

Picasso and Truth, Part 1: Object
In this audio podcast of the first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 22, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark discusses the sense of space epitomized by Picasso's The Blue Room, the artist's conception of the task of painting in the new century, and the relationships between his work and Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Truth.

Picasso and Truth, Part 2: Room
In this audio podcast of the second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 29, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark focuses on Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924). In this work, one of Picasso's largest still lifes, a new attempt is made to open the intimate, enclosed space of cubism to the outside world—the world of sheer appearance, rather than the previous Picasso world of possession and touch.

Picasso and Truth, Part 3: Window
In this audio podcast of the third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 5, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark discusses Three Dancers (1925). The lecture centers on the Three Dancers' radical re-imagining of space, particularly the relation between interior and exterior, and the way this new spatiality brings Untruth into the room.

Picasso and Truth, Part 4: Monster
In this audio podcast of the fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 19, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark discusses Painter and Model, Picasso's largest canvas from 1927, and its corresponding sketchbook material, in which a monstrous conception of the body and sexuality accompanies a wholesale new vision of pictorial space.

Picasso and Truth, Part 5: Monument
In this audio podcast of the fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 26, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark looks at Picasso's attempts in the late 1920s to escape from the room-space of cubism into a wider public world, populated by monsters (comic or tragic, benign or terrifying) on a grand scale.

Picasso and Truth, Part 6: Mural
In this audio podcast of the sixth and final lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 3, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark reflects on the place of Guernica in Picasso's repeated attempts to escape from the intimacy and containment of cubism, and to expose his painting to everything in the new century that threatened to make that interior a thing of the past.

Last Looks, Last Books: The Binocular Poetry of Death
Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University
This six-part lecture series considers the final works of five modern American poets, as they "take the last look"—reconciling the interface of life and death, without the promise of an afterlife. The accompanying publication, Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, is available for purchase in the Gallery Shop.
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 1: Introduction: Sustaining a Double View
In this audio podcast of the first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 15, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler frames the binocular styles of modern and premodern poets as they examine life and death "in a single steady gaze."
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 2: Facing the Worst: Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
In this audio podcast of the second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 22, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler discusses Wallace Stevens' The Rock, a collection of poems reflecting on "the last face of being, when life faces death."
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 3: The Contest of Melodrama and Restraint: Sylvia Plath, "Ariel"
In this audio podcast of the third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 29, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler surveys select works by Sylvia Plath, as she moves from autobiographical violence to impersonal objectivity.
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 4: Death by Subtraction: Robert Lowell, "Day by Day"
In this audio podcast of the fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 6, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler discusses Robert Lowell's last book, Day by Day, which withdraws from his earlier narrative style and instead offers spare, literal "snapshots."
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 5: Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop, "Geography III"
In this audio podcast of the fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 13, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler traces the placement of life and death in Elizabeth Bishop's late works as they move between division and integration.
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Part 6: Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill, "A Scattering of Salts"
In this audio podcast of the sixth and final lecture of the series, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 20, 2007, the esteemed poetry critic and professor Helen Vendler discusses James Merrill's "montage of self-portraits while dying," as he bids farewell in various lyric genres, sketching his life-death state in verse.
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock
Kirk Varnedoe, Institute for Advanced Study
This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops.

Part 1: Why Abstract Art?
In this first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 30, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe begins with Jackson Pollock at a key moment in the emergence of a new form of abstract art in the mid-1950s. Building on Ernst Gombrich's Mellon Lectures of 1956, Varnedoe begins by asking: Can there be a philosophy of abstract art as compelling as Gombrich's argument for illusionism? What is abstract art good for? And finally, what do we get out of abstract art?

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Part 2: Survivals and Fresh Starts
In this second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 6, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe discusses the reactions of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns to prewar traditions of constructivism, and the initiation of new movements that utilized similar forms but with very dissimilar premises. While raising the question of whether abstract art can have a fixed meaning, he argues that abstraction provides no respite from interpretation or retreat from the contingencies of art history.

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Part 3: Minimalism
In this third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 13, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe contrasts multiple forms of minimalism in the 1960s, as seen in the works of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and James Turrell, and examines, among other things, the degree to which this art is quintessentially American.

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Part 4: After Minimalism
In this fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 27, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe marks 1968 as a turning point in minimalism, when a new organicism emerged in the work of Richard Serra and Eva Hesse. A change in scale and in relationship to the body and to landscape is epitomized in works such as Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

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Part 5: Satire, Irony, and Abstract Art
In this fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 4, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe explores the 1980s, when Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenburg, and others confronted the ironic relationship between abstraction and the representation of man-made objects, thus producing a politicized critique of abstraction. Varnedoe concludes by looking at artists including Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly, whose varied approaches shifted abstract art from its position as the ultimate modern art to one of many options.

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Part 6: Abstract Art Now
In this sixth and final lecture of the series, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 11, 2003, the distinguished art historian Kirk Varnedoe returns to a question raised in lecture one: Can an argument be made for abstraction as a legitimate part of both our cognitive process and our nature as a modern liberal society? Varnedoe leads the listener through a tour of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, making an impassioned case for abstraction as an art of subjectivity—an art dependent on experience, human invention, and constant debate.

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The Moment of Caravaggio
Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University
In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops.

Part 1: A New Type of Self-Portrait
In this audio podcast of the first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 14, 2002, Professor Michael Fried opens the lecture series with a discussion of Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard. He argues for its significance as a disguised self-portrait of the artist in the act of painting.

Part 2: Immersion and Specularity
In this audio podcast of the second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 21, 2002, Professor Michael Fried addresses Caravaggio's engagement with the act of painting, and contrasts that with specular moments of detachment. Fried argues that this divided relationship lies at the heart of Caravaggio's most radical art.

Part 3: The Invention of Absorption
In this audio podcast of the third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 28, 2002, Professor Michael Fried argues that Caravaggio's depiction of his figures as so deeply engrossed in what they are doing, feeling, and thinking is revolutionary.

Part 4: Absorption and Address
In this audio podcast of the fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 5, 2002, Professor Michael Fried explores how two polar entities in Caravaggio's art—absorption and address—lead to the emergence of the gallery picture.

Part 5: Severed Representations
In this audio podcast of the fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 12, 2002, Professor Michael Fried discusses how the "violent" birth of the full-blown gallery picture (as seen in Judith and Holoferenes) is figured in Caravaggio's art as beheading or decapitation, an allegory for the act of painting.

Andrew W. Mellon

The son of Irish immigrant Thomas Mellon [1813–1908] and his wife Sarah Jane Negley [1817–1909], Andrew W. Mellon was born in Pittsburgh. Thomas Mellon came to America in 1818 with his parents, and through his entrepreneurial skills and fortuitous investments became a very wealthy and powerful man with a career as a lawyer and later a judge, and a banker. Two of his four sons, first Andrew and then Richard B. [1858-1933], succeeded him as head of the Mellon family bank, established in 1870. Andrew played a major role in the development of the Gulf Oil Corporation, and participated in the organization of the Union Steel Company, Pittsburgh Coal Company, Koppers Gas and Coke Company and numerous other companies. In 1913 Andrew and his brother Richard established the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in Pittsburgh as a memorial to their father; in 1967 the Institute merged with the Carnegie Institute of Technology to form Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1921 Andrew left Pittsburgh to serve as Secretary of the Treasury in Washington, a post he kept until 1932. He was Ambassador to Great Britain from 1932 until March 1933, after which he moved back to his native city. The remainder of his life was devoted to philanthropy.

Andrew W. Mellon was a keen collector of art. He bought his first painting around 1880 during a trip to Europe with Henry Clay Frick; it was the first visit abroad for them both. Thus began fifty years of collecting and the honing of Mellon's taste and eye for quality. Inspired by London's National Gallery, Mellon had the idea of turning his collection into the foundation of a National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1930 he established The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, the medium through which he made his gift to the nation. In 1930–1931, with the collaboration of a consortium of the art dealers M. Knoedler & Co., P & D Colnaghi, and the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin, Mellon entered into complicated negotiations and eventually acquired over twenty pictures being sold by the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg [Leningrad]. Mellon returned to Washington in 1937 for the purpose of overseeing the construction of the National Gallery of Art, but he died later the same year and thus did not live to see its opening in 1941.

In 1900 Andrew Mellon married Nora McMullen [d. 1973], a young British woman with whom he had two children, Ailsa [1901–1969] and Paul [1907–1999]. Nora had difficulty adjusting to Pittsburgh, and spent as much of the year as possible in England with their children, leading to the Mellon's estrangement and eventual divorce.

Both of Andrew Mellon's children continued in their father's tradition of art patronage. Paul served as one of the original trustees of the National Gallery of Art, overseeing its construction following his father's death, and he worked closely with its successive directors for some fifty years. Paul and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, supported the construction of the East Building of the Gallery and each became important collectors in their own right, making significant gifts of art to the Gallery over many years.